Homemade project 1 and Avranches Guesnay's Renard

Last night, I did some dessert cooking, cheesecake tarts. I choose this next because I had a lot of cream cheese in the freezer, I needed some egg whites for other projects (the crust got me two), and I need some cream for a project. Actually, I realize now, that I need a little egg yoke, so I should have just reduced the recipe and had some creme cheese on bread, but it's too late now. Anyway, I ate the big one.

For professional cake, I bought Renard from Avranches Guesnay for 507 yen. This was this week's recommend cake, so I put off trying their dark chocolate cake again. Renard is a caramel mousse cake with a hazelnut cluster base and an inner layer of dried, at least to the point of being solid, orange, which worked, but was not a major part of the flavor (because it's not that big, just a few millimeters thick). This combination worked for me, although not to the point that I feel a need to seek it out. On the point of caramel, this was somewhat bitter, so not caramel-candy sweet, but not too bitter for me. Basically, the cake was excellent and I enjoyed it, but I'm stilling looking for a great cake from there after too excellent cakes, which is enough to keep my eye on it. First, though, I want to top up my a few of my great shops to 10 cakes, but I'll also get to the backlog of unvisited shops.

Cooking project number two, was to try to make meringue-based cake. It failed again: wasn't stiff enough, but still very edible and the Silpat demonstrated its usefulness. Could double the amount of nuts, though. Not shown is project number three, which was to make rum (because that's the only flavor I have right now: if I get into making chocolates, I'll buy more, smaller bottles, but my interest is still mainly cake) chocolate truffles. I did not manage to get them round, so I'll have to do some research before next time, but the taste seemed okay.